After Hurricane Matthew, Haitians are worried aid groups will overstay their welcome

Boys
stand next to their destroyed home after Hurricane Matthew hit
JeremieThomson
Reuters

When UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon touched down in Haiti
Saturday for a one-day visit, he faced two immediate challenges
and one longer-term dilemma.

First, he had to raise the profile of the destruction from
hurricane Matthew on Oct. 4 in order to generate more
international aid.

Second, he had to find a way to allay the frustrations of local
Haitians, who complain of a slow emergency response. “Today I
personally witnessed a WFP [World Food Program] truck being
attacked," said Mr. Ban, who condemned attempts to loot the
trucks.

His long-term challenge, however, may be his toughest – and
one he shares with other public and private aid groups: How to
help Haiti rebuild while avoiding the pitfalls that have dogged
the international development push in the wake of a devastating
2010 earthquake. Billions of dollars were spent and yet, six
years later, many Haitians were still living in tents.

To a growing chorus of critics of traditional aid, Haiti has
become a poster child for how not to help the impoverished.
Decades of aid have not pulled the Western Hemisphere’s poorest
country out of poverty.

“The intentions are good. [But] if it’s not done well, it can be
harmful,” says Michael Matheson Miller, research fellow at the
Acton Institution and director of the 2014 documentary film
"Poverty Inc.," which examines how foreign aid has become big
business. “We treat people like objects of our compassion. We
create reliance upon aid. We crowd out local businesses. We
politicize economic development.”

Situation still dire

For the moment, the focus is still on emergency aid for Haiti,
whose southern peninsula is still reeling 12 days after hurricane
Matthew roared through. The Category 4 storm, blamed for
somewhere between 500 and 1,000 fatalities, leveled housing,
leaving more than 175,000 Haitians homeless, and destroyed crop
and animals, leaving an estimated 1.4 million Haitians in need of
aid, especially food and clean water.

One reason Ban came to Haiti was to call the world’s attention to
the devastation. Of the $120 million that the United Nations is
looking to raise for Haiti, it had only received $6.1 million as
of last week.

Private aid groups, by contrast, have seen a surge of giving.
Oxfam has raised around $300,000 since the hurricane. Catholic
Relief Services has already raised $1.5 million online and is on
track to reach its $5 million goal to help Haiti’s hurricane
victims, a spokeswoman says.

“There's been an outpouring of love and support from our
constituent support,” says a spokeswoman for Haitian Health
Foundation, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that has been working
for 30 years in Jérémie, one of the communities hardest hit by
hurricane Matthew. “People are offering help in a number of ways:
money, volunteers, goods.”

Workers
load relief aid sent by the U.S. onto a truck after Hurricane
Matthew passed, in Port-au-PrinceThomson Reuters

Such groups are widely viewed as key pieces of the emergency
response to disasters. Among the most important immediate needs:
“Food. Clean drinking water,” says Robyn Sieser, a spokeswoman
for Catholic Relief Services, based in the neighboring Dominican
Republic. “Overwhelmingly, [Haitians] are saying: ‘We need
materials to repair our houses, then seeds and other supplies for
farmers.’ ”

One of the biggest problems is that rural villages, linked by
roads that are iffy in the best of times, have been cut off from
emergency aid because the roads are still impassable. Aid groups
say they are slowly making progress to reach those isolated
communities. But a week and a half after the Category 4 hurricane
struck, local patience is wearing thin.

Food ... and tear gas?

An hour before Ban visited the hard-hit southern city of Les
Cayes, residents reportedly threw rocks at UN trucks and had to
be dispersed with tear gas.

In the past week, residents have looted trucks and had to be
dispersed by UN peacekeepers firing nonlethal ammunition. On
Thursday in Saint-Jean-Du-Sud, less than 10 miles away, some 100
Haitians protested the death of a motorcyclist they said was hit
by a UN convoy.

The UN’s reputation has been tarnished in Haiti because, among
other things, UN peacekeepers inadequately treated sewage back in
2010, which researchers say introduced cholera into the country.
The aftermath of this month’s hurricane has spread the disease.
Relief groups are now distributing disinfectant kits as well as
food and clean water in their bid to battle the disease.

The problem with foreign aid groups, critics say, is when their
mission shifts from temporary emergency aid to long-term
development.

Last year, ProPublica and National Public Radio published a
report criticizing the American Red Cross for taking in $488
million in donations after the Haitian earthquake but building
only six permanent homes.

The report also blasted the group for canceling a joint program
to build roads and spending far more on overhead than what it
said it would. (The Red Cross disputes the charges, saying that
while it didn’t build the houses it originally expected to, it
moved more than 100,000 Haitians from makeshift tents to improved
housing and provided clean water and sanitation.)

A
motorcyclist rides past a destroyed church after Hurricane
Matthew passed JeremieThomson
Reuters

The Clinton Foundation, which has raised more than $30 million
for Haiti since 2010, has also become a recent target for
criticism. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused
the Clintons of personally profiting from the aid effort. There’s
no evidence of that, but critics do say the foundation, as well
as many other foreign aid groups, has shaped rebuilding efforts
around its traditional development blueprint of exports rather
than giving Haitians what they really need.

“They're reproducing this old model of the banana republics,”
says Mark Schuller, author of “Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti”
and long-term affiliate with the State University of Haiti. “If
you are exploiting a cheap labor force, it’s going to be nothing
but a cheap labor force…. In the long term, it does nothing to
reinforce their capacity or provide for their own needs.”

What’s needed, these critics say, is economic development that
builds up Haitian businesses serving Haitian consumers. Foreign
aid, however well-intentioned, can sometimes undermine the local
economy. Mr. Miller’s “Poverty, Inc.,” documentary includes the
example of a Haitian solar streetlight company that was selling
five streetlights a month before the 2010 earthquake, but only
five streetlights in six months after the quake. The reason: NGOs
were giving away solar panels away for free.

“NGOs can be helpful and we need to avoid a blanket criticism of
them,” Miller says. “But at the same time, if they're actually
going to help, we need to examine the social impact and the
economic impact” of their actions.

There are some signs that the international response to this
year’s hurricane will be better than it was to the 2010
earthquake.

“We hope to be able to say ‘better’ than 2010, because the
Haitian government has asked foreign governments and NGOs to
administer their aid through [Haitian] government agencies
responsible for distributing foreign aid,” Josette Perard, Haiti
Director of the Lambi Fund of Haiti, writes in an email. “Despite
this request, some NGOs are going directly to disaster areas to
distribute food, clean water for the population. But … it’s
premature to say” how the situation will shake out.

“We have to not only learn from the lessons of the earthquake but
practice them,” says Mr. Schuller.